2002-01-01
Good Morning Faithful Ones,
We continue examining Satan's origin, but need to focus on a particularly gnarly aspect of the temptation he flaunts before us, arrogance and pride. There are a great many references in the Scriptures to the adversary and his followers exhibiting this kind of behavior. It seems to go right back to every description of him. He could have never tempted Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden to believe they could be "like God" had he not been arrogant and prideful himself [GN 3: 4-5]. IS 14: 13-14, "Your were determined to climb up to heaven and to place your throne above the highest stars. You thought you would sit like a king on that mountain in the north where the gods assemble. You said you would climb to the tops of the clouds and be like the Almighty." EZK 28: 16-17, "You were busy buying and selling, and this led you to violence and sin. So I forced you to leave My holy mountain, and the angel who guarded you drove you away from the sparkling gems. You were proud of being handsome, and your fame made you act like a fool. Because of this I hurled you to the ground and left you as a warning to other kings."
Christ understood the danger of pride and arrogance. Ironically, He was accused of that by the Pharisees who saw His teaching as blasphemy. Our Lord Himself addressed these issues in His teaching in the Sermon on the Mount in MT 5: 3, 5, "Happy are those who know they are spiritually poor; the Kingdom of heaven belongs to them!...Happy are those who are humble; they will receive what God has promised." Later in MT 6: 19-21, He teaches us to put our riches in heaven rather than to be obsessed with the material things of earth. MT 6: 24 looks at this issue in another way. "No one can be a slave of two masters; he will hate one and love the other; he will be loyal to one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money." Paul's young associate, Timothy, writes about this in a way to which we should all relate. 1 TIM 6: 10, "For the love of money is a source of all kinds of evil. Some have been so eager to have it that they have wandered away from the faith and have broken their hearts with many sorrows." How can we not think of those high level executives at Global Crossing and Enron Corporations? No doubt many of them were church-goers. How could the buying and selling that Lucifer did in heaven lead to violence? We must see that it is arrogance and pride on his part. Even the seemingly nicest people in our own congregations are sorely tempted and sometimes fall to Satan's temptation when something doesn't meet their expectations with their investments or any aspect of their financial dealings.
It seems that pride and arrogance are at the very heart of what went wrong with Lucifer and his followers to make them God's enemies and ours too. When Timothy was discussing the criteria for the leaders in the early church, he put his focus directly on both the problem and its nasty consequences. 1 TIM 3: 6-7, "He must be mature in the faith, so that he will not swell up with pride and be condemned as the devil was. He should be a man who is respected b the people outside the church, so that he will not be disgraced and fall into the devil's trap." King Solomon wrote in PR 3: 34, "He [God] has no use for conceited people, but shows favor to those who are humble," and in PR 16: 18, "Pride leads to destruction, and arrogance to downfall." Can you see the amazing consistency of the Bible's teachings, whether they be from the OT or the NT? That's the product of a God Who dearly loves His children, enough to warn them of the traps that Satan puts out for us, because of who our adversary is.
We must find comfort and motivation in what we learn from RO 8: 1, "There is no condemnation now for those who live in union with Christ Jesus." I know that I keep going back to this passage I'm about to cite, but that's because the Holy Spirit leads me to it. We need to know that we are equipped with the power to fend off Satan's temptation and overcome it. So God gives us through Paul, EPH 1: 18-20, "I ask that your minds may be opened to see His light, so that you will know what is the hope to which He has called you, how rich are the wonderful blessings He promises His people, and how very great is His power at work in us who believe. This power working in us is the same as the mighty strength which He used when He raised Christ from death and seated Him at His right side in the heavenly world." Dear Ones, that is the same heavenly world out of which these evil forces were cast, the ones spoken of in EPH 6: 12. We can use this passage as a reminder that no matter how difficult our personal battle with Satan's attempts to make us arrogant and proud are, we can invoke God's power given to us to fend it off.
PRAYER: O Lord, it would be easy for those of us who attend church regularly and are active in our congregations to assume that we are without sin. Any assumption of that is giving in to Satan's desire to tempt us to pride and arrogance. PS 53: 2-3 establish as truth that we don't like to face. "God looks down from heaven at mankind to see if there are any who are wise, any who worship Him. But they have all turned away; they are all equally bad. Not one of them does what is right, not a single one." Paul expresses this same truth in RO 3: 23, "All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God." But, because You love us, You do not leave us hanging without hope. You told Isaiah that You would send a suffering Servant. IS 53: 3-5, "We despised Him and rejected Him; He endured suffering and pain. No one would even look at Him-we ignored Him as if He were nothing. But He endured the suffering that should have been ours, the pain we should have borne. All the while we thought that His suffering was punishment sent by God. But because of our sins He was wounded, beaten because of the evil we did. We are healed by the punishment He suffered, and made whole by the blows He received." You, Dearest Abba, have given us the same power You used to raise this suffering Servant from death to life to resist Satan's temptation. We pledge to recognize that and to invoke it in our daily lives. We humbly offer You deeply heartfelt thanks for sending Your only begotten Son to die on the cross, so we could be saved. We dedicate ourselves to joining in Your battle against evil in whatever way You call us to do. You are to be praised, trusted, obeyed, worshipped, adored, given loyalty, served diligently, and to be treated as the Best Friend we have ever had. In Christ's name, amen.
In tomorrow's message I am led to finish up on the subject of pride and arrogance and, should space allow, pose the question to be examined: Did God create anything that was evil? If we are willing to look for it, we will find all around us examples of ways that our loving Abba manifests His feelings for us. Naturally, Satan is there too with his ugly temptations. We are called upon to examine our lives and to get to know our Lord even better than we do right now. That is so that we can find sin, get rid of it, and recognize to an even greater degree the depth of how God loves us and empowers us to be victors against the adversary in Christ's name. Peter and I also send you our love too.
Grace Be With You Always,
Lynn